Keith & Andrea's Blog
Keith Goes Home
Dear Friends,
I’m writing to inform you that Keith went to be with Jesus yesterday, Sunday January 22nd 2012, at 3:00 pm. Keith’s last few weeks here on earth were peaceful. He was visited by many friends and relatives whom he was always pleased to see. Andrea was holding Keith, her beloved husband of 33 years, when he drew his last breath. Keith loved you all so much and I know that he would want you to know.
Thank you for your fellowship, comments, love and prayers through this last part of Keith’s adventure here with us.
We hope to continue to post Keith’s insights and wisdom here in the future so please check back. While we grieve the loss of a great man we can rejoice in his everlasting life with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Psalm 23 (The Message)
1-3 God, my shepherd! I don’t need a thing.
You have bedded me down in lush meadows,
you find me quiet pools to drink from.
True to your word,
you let me catch my breath
and send me in the right direction.
4 Even when the way goes through
Death Valley,
I’m not afraid
when you walk at my side.
Your trusty shepherd’s crook
makes me feel secure.
5 You serve me a six-course dinner
right in front of my enemies.
You revive my drooping head;
my cup brims with blessing.
6 Your beauty and love chase after me
every day of my life.
I’m back home in the house of God
for the rest of my life.
Lord, thank you for Keith and the beautiful life he led. His transparency and authenticity were a breath of fresh air to so many of us and we are so grateful that we were able to walk through some of this adventure with him. Please cover Keith’s wife, Andrea, and his entire family with your mighty comfort and peace. We ask all this in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Blessings to you all,
Jessica Lyon
Friend and Assistant
The Worst of Times and the Best of Times
New Year 2012
My pitiful little self-centered mind is about half taken up with what my uncle called “the big C” (or malignant cancer) which is (though I have only seen evidence of it) pretty well eating away on my vital organs as you read this.
When I say it is the “best of times,” I’m referring to the fact that I’m clearer in my mind about the way I want to live and relate to those I know and love and whom God has put in my life.
This is the first time I could not negotiate any way out of my problem (cancer-ridden state). But I can still surrender each day—and sometimes each hour—to God and to loving His people—meaning the rest of you.
Although I have lived a larger-than-life life I am excited about the future. And I’m beginning to learn to share with people about the possibilities in their lives to use the creative potential in them.
Some days I am very sad about the terminal aspects of my illness, but I’m also very thankful for the eighty-four years of amazing life I’ve already been fortunate enough to live. Getting here on New Year’s Eve of 2011, I’m grateful for God’s resounding message about loving us (and the fact that so many of his people are living lives of self-limiting love) and for the fact that some days I am beginning to see that I can give and receive love from the God Jesus called Father and from his people who wander into our house to speak of love and gratitude to God.
Right now I’m peaceful. And I have a heart full of love for God, for those of you who are reading this as I wish you a glorious and peaceful new year in 2012.
Love from Andrea and me,
Keith
And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. – (Phil. 4:7) The Message
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. – Mother Teresa
Christmas Eve
Keith has written several blogs recently. Due to a week of confusion they are just now ready to post. We apologize for the time lag.
December 24, 2011
This morning our friend Trice took me to a meeting of a group of men. These men have had such an enormous positive influence on my life the last few years that I continue to get up on Saturday mornings and pay whatever price it takes to go and learn more about God. And I am also learning to become a more authentic man in a world that seems to have cut itself off from the moral and spiritual roots to the extent that, in 1961, my mentor told me the world was turning into a cut-flower society.
This meeting is unique in my experience in that all we do is listen to those who want to share their experience, strength, and hope with each other without contradiction, giving advice, or trying to “straighten each other out”.
Since I have often been reticent to show my real feelings with men, this place has been a real spiritual oasis in the midst of a desert of conventional thinking.
This morning I shared with this group the reality that I had had to stop three times in getting ready to go to the meeting because I had pooped in my pants and had to clean up three times before I could come. But after telling these men about this experience of shame as a very proud man, I felt spiritually cleansed somehow. And I thanked these men I’ve come to love so much for all their help and support in dealing with the progress of the aggressive terminal cancer with which I have been diagnosed.
At the end of the meeting, a dear friend handed me this page which I am including in the blog. It is a reading from the book, Jesus Calling by Sarah Young.
The principal reason why prayers are not answered is because in our hearts we limit the power of God. The Bible constantly tells us that the people got into trouble because they limited the Holy One. When you say, “There is no way out of my difficulty,” what can it possibly mean except that you cannot see a way out? When you say, “It is too late now,” what can that possibly mean except that it is too late for you?
When you pray you are turning to the power of God, and surely you will admit that God is omnipotent, and therefore nothing can be too difficult or too late, or too soon for Him. You will surely admit that Infinite Wisdom knows at least more than you do, to put the thing rather mildly. Well, Infinite Wisdom takes action when we pray and so our own limitations do not matter—unless we think they do.
Children often find themselves completely overcome by a difficulty that a grown-up person easily solves. What to the child seems an impossibility is quite easy to his father, and so even our greatest difficulties are simple to God.
Infinite Wisdom knows a beautiful and joyous solution to any dilemma. Do not limit the power of God for good in your life.
“…Is my hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem? Or have I no power to deliver? … (Isaiah 50:2)
I thanked the members of the group for the enormous gift of their acceptance of my reality on this journey, which without them would be the loneliest passage of my life. Then I went home with a song of gratitude in my heart for this band of powerful, loving, and compassionate men whose presence and acceptance are as close to a community of wisdom and holiness as I can imagine.
Tonight, hours after the meeting was over, there was a knock on our front door and, to my amazement, I saw (and heard) a group of these very unlikely Gentle Giants and some of their women friends and relatives — singing CHRISTMAS CAROLS!!!
I don’t think Andrea and I have ever been so moved by the Spirit of God on Christmas Eve!
Merry Christmas to you all!
With much love,
Keith Miller
At once the angel was joined by a huge angelic choir singing God’s praises: Glory to God in the heavenly heights, Peace to all men and women on earth who please him. (Luke 2:13, The Message)
I Love You, Daddy
This post is really different for me to write. It is about the process of making the transition from a life of faith in the God Jesus called, “Father,” to the end of that life in the process we call “dying”.
As I am writing this draft, Andrea and I are now in the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and have received the news that the cancer is in so many crucial areas of my body (liver, pancreas, lymph nodes) that finding a “cure” is not one of my options.
For almost ten days I couldn’t eat or drink anything without gagging and throwing up. Not only that, some bile came up into my throat due to a blockage in my upper intestine so everything I tried to swallow tasted like feces. I Finally contacted my doctor about my concern and was immediately sent to ER, put on a stomach pump to relieve the pressure from trapped fluids in my stomach, IV’s for hydration, and put on the schedule for an endoscopy to try to correct the problem.
In the meantime my three daughters arrived and along with my wife, Andrea, we had a “love-in.”
During all this time I have continued my practice of walking through my days and nights thanking God for all the advantages and blessings that have given me the freedom to love people and help them become what God created them (particularly) to be, and to spend time writing and playing with Andrea, and other members of what has become our new “extended family.” and others on our ‘team.’
One of the main blessings on my continual gratitude list had been my health. So when that was failing, I became grateful for the clinic I was able to get to, and for my friends who began to step up and help us get in to see these remarkable medical specialists.
But all this unexpected serious information and experience began to depress me and affect my positive attitude and practices. When I got to my lowest point, a visiting friend took me to a meeting in the hospital area. Simply being honest and sharing my fear and my experience, strength and hope got me through a very difficult time, and prompted me to write the e-mail getting honest with my physicians about my inability to eat or drink.
All this, and my family’s arrival, interrupted my description of the inner process of dying. With the family and a few friends here filling my life with love, my faith was concrete, my loving listening and gratitude were intact, and my awareness of God’s healing presence intact somehow.
The night before the family was to leave I began to pray alone in the dark hospital room. I asked myself what I believe about a “life after this one.” I realized with a shock that I really hadn’t spent a lot of time learning about “heaven.” Fear suddenly gripped me. I calmed myself by surrendering my entire life, death, and future to God. And then I became aware of what I have come to believe happens when some believers die.
My conscious focus during the past few years had been on learning to live and share the self-limiting love I have experienced from God in the present “Reign of God” that Jesus announced, described and inaugurated throughout his entire life and work. I’ve done this because it is what I saw Jesus doing.
When he did speak to his disciples about how they and their lives would be evaluated in the last analysis, he referred mostly to how well they had replicated the LIFE of self-limiting love he had given them. And for me that included the way Jesus had referred and deferred to his loving Father as “Daddy” in a continuous dialogue.
But then, in that dark night alone, I suddenly thought, “What’s going to happen to me and my relationship to God that has come to fill and inform my entire life?” And I almost panicked. Compared to what I had already received and experienced in this life with the Father as Daddy, the pictures Christians had developed about Heaven seemed pale and insignificant. I had moments of thinking maybe I should stop and do a crash course on “Heaven” with someone I knew. And finally, I once again surrendered my life and my entire future to God and went to sleep.
The next morning I just happened to talk to a Christian who’s spent a lot of time studying about Heaven. I suddenly remembered Jesus and what he did in his own life as it was drawing to an end. He simply trusted his Heavenly Daddy, did and said what he could determine was what God wanted Him, Jesus, to say and do. And at the last of his life, in the Garden of Gethsemane, with nothing in hand to assure him in advance that what he had to do would turn out for him personally as he hoped things would, Jesus decided to take the first steps alone—even if all his own followers deserted him.
I saw that for me—if I am really to follow Jesus, I am going to have to step up to the doorway of death that I am facing right now—the end of all I know of life and human experience. I must stand before that doorway with the same faith of a small child as Jesus did, doing what he thought his daddy was asking him to do–regardless of whether his own followers (and in my case what other Christians) may think. Although I am in the midst of my family and those of you who are a part of life’s family too, I am all alone.
All I can think of to say as I approach that door is, “Daddy who is in Heaven, it’s me, John Keith. All l I have to give you is the life of love that you have given me! All the rest of the material possessions and public attention that came about as a result of the life I built for you as a Christian—all that has gone somehow. All that is left is this little boy who loves you as his Daddy. And I’m knocking, wanting to come in and let you continue—in whatever way—to teach me about how you made us to be when you created us way back in the beginning in the garden. But if this is not your plan, or whatever you have for me (or don’t have), whatever happens (or doesn’t happen) I’m knocking on this huge Dark Door of Death, wanting to come in and say ‘Thank you,’ and ‘I love you, Daddy.’*
My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? John 14:1-3
If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! Matthew 7:10-12
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Matthew 7:20-22
And prayers come with these words for all of you who have become so dear to me.
(Note: Since writing this post Keith has come back to Austin. He will begin chemotherapy next week. Your prayers are appreciated during this time and we are certainly grateful for the kind words and prayers you have offered thus far. Thank you.)
* This account is not “the way” any Christian (or others) “should” think about approaching God at the time of his or her own death. But this was my honest experience the other night as I was realizing that my own life—as I have lived it—is coming to an end. Not being an expert of any kind, this is just part of my own “experience, strength and hope.” I miss you all and love you very much! –John Keith
Gratitude and Grief
After several days of medical procedures and tests we were told last Thursday (October 20th) by my Gastroenterologist that the internal blockage that has caused recent discomfort is the result of the bile duct being squeezed shut because of a tumor pressing against it. The tumor is right next to my liver. Because of its location it cannot be removed—too many other things in the area.
On Friday I went into surgery where a stent was inserted into the bile duct to allow it to drain so poisonous bile will not be backed up in my system. They also took a biopsy of the tumor and the liver to see if they have been “communicating.”
I was in the hospital overnight and most of Saturday. This past Tuesday, Andrea and I met with my doctor where we learned the tumor is malignant. The doctors could not give us any information about a prognosis at the time.
This has been a sudden shock, since I have been dealing with a neck issue. The neck discomfort was resolved a few weeks ago and then pain in my stomach increased.
We are processing the abrupt change in our lives because of the inoperable aspect of the problem and the fact that all our plans that included me will possibly be canceled.
Many of you have been so loyal to us in your reading and responding to these blogs that we thought the least I could do was to be honest with you about this unscheduled confronting of my own death, since this is a big part of the adventure with God.
Andrea and I are very much in love and closer than we thought two people could get, so we’re experiencing the biggest shock I could have imagined—although, having buried all my “growing up” family by the time I was 28, I should not be so surprised, but I find myself in a new world of “reality.”
Last Thursday, when I told a dear friend about what’s happening he said, “I’m coming to town in January and I’ll look forward to a visit then.” I had to gently remind him that “I might not be alive by then.” This is just a vivid example of what we are experiencing in every relationship we have.
Since we have been working full time on a book for five years that includes a trip clear through the Bible I am going to try to tell the story on video. We will report on our progress on this in the future. And as my commitment has been to you all along, I’ll try to continue to respond to your questions that come up as we are walking through our adventure with the Lord and each other.
Bottom line of all of this: We will appreciate your prayers for healing if possible and for continuing to live for him in either case.
I am extremely grateful not only for the amazing life I’ve had, but for friends like you who are reading this.
This is not something we would normally write, but since the last part of this life is a part of the adventure of living with God and with each other, I’ll see what I can do.
The most important thing on my agenda is the people I love—which includes more people than I ever dreamed it would and certainly some of you who are reading this.
***
After a long day at the hospital on Tuesday Keith came home and enjoyed a wonderful evening with his family. Then early Wednesday morning Keith woke up with a fever and discomfort and was taken to the emergency room. There the doctors were able to reduce his fever and he is feeling better. Keith is staying in the hospital for a few days to make sure that any infection is eliminated. The next step, after Keith comes home, is to see an oncologist about possible treatments for this tumor.
We invite you to leave your comments, thoughts and prayers for Keith and Andrea and all of their family here. As they are able they will check in and read your comments.
We thank you for your prayers.
Lord, thank you that you promised to prepare a place for us, beginning now, so that we may be together with you always.
“…I go to prepare a place for you.” John 14:2b
Photo © MaxPaul Franklin 2011
